Skate 2

We start to see the diminishing returns of any studio working under strict contractual obligations emerge with Skate 2, a tale as old as gaming itself. As plenty fans of the series have stated over the past 13 or so years, this game does have quite a bit of excess fat on its bones. As to whether it's for better or worst, well, it's entirely dependent on which part of game you slice into. Skate 2 hides it's bloat well as it tucks it within it's nooks and crevices, but if you look, it's there.

To be clear, I've played this game on both 360 and PS3 over the years (whether at my home or at friends places circa early 2010s) and the game performance has always been the biggest issue with the game. And this was likely the result of EA wanting more out of Skate 2 as a sequel. Better graphics, better presentation. More content—empty or not. These are all buzzwords everyone familiar with the industry should know, and these buzzwords are famous for quite commonly being the bane of many a studio.

Skate 3 would go onto eventually scale back many of the of environmental features and visual effects present in 2, resulting in a night and day improvement in frame rate consistency. These aforementioned graphical settings along with the beautifully designed open world in 2 have been praised plenty by fans of the series, but it always came at the cost of increased performance costs. Having the map separated into pieces allows for a far less demanding title, but at the cost of immersion. I personally think Skate 2 has by far the best Free Skate mode... minus the fact that the AI skateboarders still show up in Free Skate, and turn all the skateparks into the virtual equivalent of a scooter kid minefie-I mean, mindfield.

Outside of Free Skate... The missions in this game are really hit or miss. If it has anything to do with street skating, it's probably going to be fun. But all the events featuring transition or vert skateboarding are really rough, as the series never really got close to being able to get that type of skateboarding feeling OK (its a little sluggish in skate 2... skating transition on a real board is very fast and intimidating) until skate 3... And even then, it always felt there was room for improvement. I mean you can look at SkaterXL, which doesn't really have transition skateboarding as an option. But like I said, the street skating is pristine. It's an awkward feeling after playing Skate 3, as it feels maybe halfway between the "Normal" and "Hardcore" difficulties in that game, but it's rewarding nonetheless. Sometimes it feels indeterminate and the collision meshes are rough, but that has more to do with the performance issues I alluded to earlier.

There are some missions in this game that feel like an 80s game the Angry Video Game Nerd would rage at, with some tasks feeling like works of spite from the developers. There's even a mission where the "Press X to continue, O to retry" button order is reversed just to mess with you, and it's a hard one. But there's nothing masochistic in this game, just really weird choices. Well, one mission is masochistic, against the crailtap you-know-whos. I guess it was hard to be creative in making missions about a wooden toy while having to program it in a way for the game to challenge you against the task of a "Killed It" goal. Also doesn't help that the AI in this game is abysmal.

But areas of this game like MongoCorp (Big Black was an amazing gameplay addition, to be fair), the skatestoppers crowbar guy or the generic NPC pool drainer... They just feel like excess fat. It's very cheap in game to use their services, and all that shows is a short one second skipable cutscene. It just feels like the illusion of added content, when all that really affected me was a brief cutscene of some dude rolling up with a crowbar and uncapping a ledge permanently. And that's my biggest criticism of this game: A lot of the content just feels hyper saturated and in excess. I mean, even the games visual filter expresses that sentiment of saturation...

There's a line in Tony Hawk Pro Skater's 3 "Canada" level where an NPC teases (when you bail) something along the lines of: "You still don't got it? It's the same control scheme two years going!". And when playing that game in retrospect, that line of dialogue was brilliantly self aware by the developer. The THPS series died because it grew stagnant, and Activision wanted them to (just like EA did with Skate) add more and "change it up". Of course with THPS, we got the awkward stepchild of THPS4, which abandoned the level scheme of the first three in favor of an open world layout that served as a precursor to the THUG series.

But Skate (the series) never really got a chance to make such strides, as the reality of being a AAA studio in the 2010s began to sit in for the entire industry: Grow or die. I think it's likely that EA truly didn't want to fund Skate 4 because they didn't want to pay for another game identical to the previous ones with little changes. And it's a shame because that's been their philosophy with any other game studio that they have an ability to milk for money. Black Box was never able to dangle the money in front of their faces. The only time they got EA to bite and give them a bag for development was for Skate 2. There's just really not much to skateboarding. It's jumping around on a wooden toy for no reason. And that's always been the divine beauty of it.

Skate 2 is the best game to just fuck around in. The city is perfect, the problem is that the objective they put in this city are absolutely godawful. And on top of that, this game doesn't have the same soul and attention to detail Skate 1 had in many ways.

We'll start with the superficial: the interface and character customization (male) are worse than Skate 1. Yes, Skate 2 allows you to be a girl where the original did not, but I simply liked my Skate 1 character better in every way than his Skate 2 counterpart, from hairstyle to clothing and board accessories. The facial options are also less involved.
Skate 1 allowed you to get sponsored by four different companies, one each for your board, wheels, trucks, and shoes. Skate 2 also allows you to do this, but they simply didn't care about it. Other than your board, every other sponsorship offer is thrown at you after completing an objective chain. They don't let you muse over which company has the best-looking gear, or even let you see what you're using currently. They just tell you to choose with nothing other than a logo, so my truck sponsor ended up only making trucks that clashed horribly with my neon green Creature boards. I was not pleased.
Skate 2's soundtrack has some baffling choices, such as a DragonForce song, but, luckily, you can turn off the songs you don't want to hear in-game, and make a pretty nice playlist.

Skate 2 features a "rebuilt" version of the city from the first game. Most areas are absolutely perfect, but a few sections are simply worse than the original. The suburbs are replaced with woods, roads, and a dam. However, the business district got hit hardest, and not wholly for level design reasons.
In my Skate 1 review, I mentioned how much I absolutely hated "no-skate zones", where security guards would chase you around and try to tackle you. Well, Skate 2's """plot""" is that a corporation that hates skating came in to rebuild the city, so there are more no-skate zones than ever before, and more guards to go along with them. The objectives also tend to take you into no-skate zones more often.
Along with this comes grind blockers, which can be removed by calling a guy. This just means that you have to sit through an additional loading screen when you want to skate there. What fun.

The worst objective type from Skate 1 was the "follow me" missions, where you had to follow another skater. Skate 2 not only brings these back, but puts in more of them than before. The best part of these is that the skaters you need to follow can be hit by cars and fall down. However, when they get up, they teleport to where they would have been if they'd kept going and not been hit by the car, causing you to lose instantly. They also don't take the same path every time, so it's not even trial and error, it's just RNG.
Your fellow skaters are still the scum of the earth, as well. There was one contest I entered called GVR, where six skaters were all on the course at the same time. Everyone kept skating into me and knocking me over. My team won the contest, but, since I didn't get to actually do anything, it didn't feel like an accomplishment at all.
Another contest is the San Van Slam, where you're supposed to launch off a big ramp and do huge tricks. This worked in the first game, because there was one well-made ramp. Skate 2's version has four ramps, three of which are absolutely horrible. breaking my back on the edge of other ramps is not my idea of a good time.

When I played Skate 1, I would sometimes wish I could get off my skateboard to climb stairs or a hill or something. Skate 2 makes me wish I couldn't. Skate 2's on-foot controls are so terrible, and you move at a snail's pace. I absolutely can't stand any time I'm forced to get off the board.
What's worse is that EA has added the ability to move objects around. Challenges will force you to move things around so you can skate on them. This simply doesn't work well for two main reasons.
1: Sometimes, placing an object to complete an objective is extremely precise. Once, they told me to move a quarterpipe so I could do a handplant on a basketball hoop's backboard. Slightly too close, and I'd hit my head on the backboard. Slightly too far, and I couldn't reach it at all. It was a frustrating experience of constantly getting off my board and sluggishly moving myself over to the quarterpipe again to push it very slightly.
2: MOVABLE OBJECTS STILL HAVE MOVEMENT PHYSICS WHEN YOU'RE SKATING
Meaning that if you beef a trick or are being chased by a security guard, the object you need to trick off can be smacked out of place, forcing you to move it yet again.
This mechanic is simply horrible, no question about it in my mind.

Objectives will also be too vague. One example I remember, the objective said "use a ramp to grind the rail". What rail? There were five in the immediate area. After trying every rail, eventually a hint popped up telling me I had to move a ramp, move a rail, and move another ramp, and trick off all of them in one sequence. I had no idea the rails could even be moved.
Another objective required me to leap from one ledge across a street to a much lower ledge. I couldn't survive the fall without bailing, so I had to look it up. Apparently, around the corner was a ramp to move that you needed to land on in order to actually land the trick. I was unimpressed.
The new version of the video challenges also don't tell you what you need to do until you start them, and they can be started anywhere. "Grind for 75 feet" doesn't work if there are no rails around, so you have to cancel the mission. Then it autosaves for no reason, which takes too long when you're trying to find a challenge you can actually do at your current spot.

Skate 2's campaign flashes between really fun and really frustrating. I've since spent hours and hours fucking around in the city, and can't really give this game a low score.

The best EA Skate game gameplay-wise, with a great world design and best objectives and missions to do. The biggest downside is how ugly the gritty filter they plastered everywhere is, everything looks polluted and uninviting, and some of the songs in the soundtrack are terrible and sometimes kill the mood you have while playing. The Tony Hawk games did the soundtracks better, none of the Skate games had a strong soundtrack except maybe the first one which even had original songs by retired skateboarder Tommy Guerrero.
Another strong point this game has is that you can use a big dude called Big Black to bounce around everywhere when you fall off your skateboard.

I tried skateboarding once. I got on the board and tried to go forwards, immediately fell off, repeated the process a few times, got bored and angry, eventually hurt myself quite badly, decided skateboarding was not for me, and packed the whole thing in forever after about an hour. So I guess if Skate 2's mission was to create a realistic approximation of what skateboarding's really like, they only thing they forgot to do was punch me in the face.

That actually might have been preferable, now that I think of it.

I just cannot understand for my life of me how and why this series managed to supplant Tony Hawk's Pro Skater as the game of choice for this sport when it treats the notion of 'fun' like a disease, like something to be avoided at all costs. The most interesting thing you'll do in this whole game is landscaping - and I'm using the most generous term possible for 'grabbing hold of a dumpster and moving it from here to there'. The fact that it's glitched to absolute fuck might be amusing if it were a better game, but when you can fall off your board going downhill and stare at a screen for a full three minutes as your characters repeatedly hits the same tree over and over and over again before the game gets bored and crashes, it becomes pretty clear that this game should never have been released in such a terrible state. Not that it would have been better without the glitches, necessarily; at least they occasionally complete a mission for you so that you don't have to go through the tedium of doing it yourself.

I get that some people might have wanted something a little more realistic than THPS. That's fine. What's not fine is creating a game with absolutely no sense of flow. What's not okay is creating a game where you have to get off your board every time you want to go up a staircase, or even a curb (a curb that half the time you can't even see is there). What's not okay is a game where the button to gain speed on a halfpipe is the same button that makes you come off the halfpipe and bail. What's not okay is a sparse open world design that forces you to manipulate objects to create decent lines, effectively asking you to do the work that the developers should have done in the first place.

And you know, this all seems to stem from the idea that the Tony Hawk's formula has become stale. It hadn't. It really, really hadn't. Underground, Project 8, and Proving Ground were all solid, gradual improvements on a basic game idea that had retained all its strengths throughout multiple iterations and generations, gradually becoming more and more challenging without losing its instant appeal, while remaining easy to pick up for a newcomer. Skate doesn't have that - I can't imagine too many newbies being too enthralled at the idea that the controls for 'ollie' and 'kickflip' are damn near identical, not when it means falling over every time you try to jump up a small step and accidentally pull off a trick instead. (And did I mention that the camera is controlled by the same stick you use for tricks? Yeah, thanks for that, that's not awkward at all.) It actually feels like it was designed for something other than a console - because almost everything is done with either of the joysticks, you could play this with the controller for a remote control car and barely notice the difference. Lord knows what all those buttons on the controller did to annoy these developers - game pads, from any console generation, are designed to make it easy to press the main buttons, be they ABC on a Mega Drive pad or square, X, triangle, and circle on a Dualshock controller. Skate 2 decided to take the avant-garde approach of making those buttons effectively useless, and then awkwardly adding them in later when they decided that pushing forward on the left stick wasn't enough to go forward (fucking hell, seriously) and that you should spend half your time running around carrying your board, because that's exactly what everybody wants when they buy a skateboarding game.

Woeful. Honestly an absolutely awful approach to a genre that had been reliably producing great games for years, with so many awful decisions made during its creative process that it almost starts to feel like a parody of a computer game. Brain-meltingly bad. I guess it wouldn't be so galling if there was a current alternative to this, but right now it looks like the Skate franchise has all but killed off one of my favourite genres, and that elevates it from an embarrassing dud to an absolute tragedy.

2014 edit: thank God for OlliOlli I guess!

2016 edit: and thanks for the second patch of THPS5 too! Sorry Skate - you tried, but you failed.